Researchers at the University of York have discovered a link between young people's ability to perform well at two popular video games and high levels of intelligence.
Studies carried out at the Digital Creativity Labs (DC Labs) at York found that some action strategy video games can act like IQ tests. The researchers' findings are published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
The York researchers stress the studies have no bearing on questions such as whether playing computer games makes young people smarter or otherwise. They simply establish a correlation between skill at certain online games of strategy and intelligence.
The researchers focused on 'Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas' (MOBAs) -- action strategy games that typically involve two opposing teams of five individuals -- as well as multiplayer 'First Person Shooter' games. These types of games are hugely popular with hundreds of millions of players worldwide.
The team from York's Departments of Psychology and Computer Science carried out two studies. The first examined a group of subjects who were highly experienced in the MOBA League of Legends -- one of the most popular strategic video games in the world with millions of players each day.
In this study, the researchers observed a correlation between performance in the strategic game League of Legends and performance in standard paper-and-pencil intelligence tests.
The second study analysed big datasets from four games: Two MOBAs (League of Legends and Defence of the Ancients 2 (DOTA 2)) and two 'First Person Shooters' (Destiny and Battlefield 3). First Person Shooters (FPSs) are games involving shooting enemies and other targets, with the player viewing the action as though through the eyes of the character they are controlling.
In this second study, they found that for large groups consisting of thousands of players, performance in MOBAs and IQ behave in similar ways as players get older. But this effect was not found for First Person Shooters, where performance declined after the teens.
The researchers say the correlation between ability at action strategy video games such as League of Legends and Defence of the Ancients 2 (DOTA 2) and a high IQ is similar to the correlation seen in other more traditional strategy games such as chess.
Corresponding author Professor Alex Wade of the University of York's Department of Psychology and Digital Creativity Labs said: "Games such as League of Legends and DOTA 2 are complex, socially-interactive and intellectually demanding. Our research would suggest that your performance in these games can be a measure of intelligence.
"Research in the past has pointed to the fact that people who are good at strategy games such as chess tend to score highly at IQ tests. Our research has extended this to games that millions of people across the planet play every day."
The discovery of this correlation between skill and intelligence opens up a huge new data source. For example, as 'proxy' tests of IQ, games could be useful at a global population level in fields such as 'cognitive epidemiology' -- research that examines the associations between intelligence and health across time -- and as a way of monitoring cognitive health across populations.
Athanasios Kokkinakis, a PhD student with the EPSRC Centre for Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI) research programme at York, is the lead author on the study.
He said: "Unlike First Person Shooter (FPS) games where speed and target accuracy are a priority, Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas rely more on memory and the ability to make strategic decisions taking into account multiple factors.
"It is perhaps for these reasons that we found a strong correlation between skill and intelligence in MOBAs."
Co-author Professor Peter Cowling, Director of DC Labs and the IGGI programme at York, said: "This cutting-edge research has the potential for substantial impact on the future of the games and creative industries -- and on games as a tool for research in health and psychology.
"The IGGI programme has 48 excellent PhD students working with industry and across disciplines -- there is plenty more to come!"
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Materials provided by University of York. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A videogame designed by Yale researchers to promote health and reduce risky behavior in teens improves sexual health knowledge and attitudes among minority youth, according to a new study. The findings validate the value of the videogame as a tool to engage and educate teens at risk for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), said the researchers.
"We saw significant and sustained positive changes in terms of attitudes about sexual health and sexual health knowledge," said Lynn Fiellin, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and in the Child Study Center.
Adolescents are significantly affected by HIV and other STIs, yet many lack access to sexual health education that could minimize their risks, said the researchers, who note that videogames offer an accessible, portable tool for promoting health and reducing risky behavior among teenagers, particularly minority youth who are disproportionately impacted.
Led by Fiellin, the research team recruited more than 300 students, ages 11 to 14, from afterschool and summer programs in the New Haven area for the study. For six weeks, the youth either played the intervention game PlayForward: Elm City Stories, or one of several unrelated videogames on iPad tablets for up to 75 minutes twice per week. Designed with teen and expert input, PlayForward is a serious role-playing videogame that engages youth with a variety of challenges and choices in fictional yet realistic life situations.
During the one-year study period, the students were assessed for a range of outcomes, including sexual health attitudes, knowledge, intention to initiate sex, and sexual activity. Compared to youth who played the non-intervention games, the PlayForward teens demonstrated improvements in both sexual health attitudes and knowledge at the end of 12 months. For example, the PlayForward group was more likely to accurately respond that it was true that a girl can get pregnant the first time she has sex.
While the groups of teens did not differ in their intention to initiate sex or be sexually active, the findings are significant and important, said Fiellin: "It was proof of concept. To our knowledge, never before has a videogame intervention been developed with such extensive input from its target audience, and tested through rigorous scientific methods over a long stretch of time, demonstrating that kids will engage in a game with serious content and learn things that impact the way they think and potentially what they do."
Fiellin and her colleagues plan to refine and further disseminate the game content with the goal of influencing youth behavior. They have received additional funding to modify the PlayForward game to focus on other health outcomes in adolescents, including smoking and electronic cigarette use prevention and the promotion of HIV/STI testing.
The findings are published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
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Materials provided by Yale University. Original written by Ziba Kashef. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers have engineered a strain of electricity-producing bacteria that can grow using hydrogen gas as its sole electron donor and carbon dioxide as its sole source of carbon.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst report their findings at the 113th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
"This represents the first result of current production solely on hydrogen," says Amit Kumar, a researcher on the study who, along with his co-authors are part of the Lovley Lab Group at the university.
Under the leadership of Derek Lovley the lab group has been studying Geobacter bacteria since Lovley first isolated Geobacter metallireducens in sand sediment from the Potomac River in 1987. Geobacter species are of interest because of their bioremediation, bioenergy potential, novel electron transfer capabilities, the ability to transfer electrons outside the cell and transport these electrons over long distances via conductive filaments known as microbial nanowires.
Kumar and his colleagues studied a relative of G. metallireducens called Geobacter sulfurreducens, which has the ability to produce electricity by reducing organic carbon compounds with a graphite electrode like iron oxide or gold to serve as the sole electron acceptor. They genetically engineered a strain of the bacteria that did not need organic carbon to grow in a microbial fuel cell.
"The adapted strain readily produced electrical current in microbial fuel cells with hydrogen gas as the sole electron donor and no organic carbon source," says Kumar, who notes that when the hydrogen supply to the microbial fuel cell was intermittently stopped electrical current dropped significantly and cells attached to the electrodes did not generate any significant current.
This research was supported by funding by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Office of Naval Research.
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Materials provided by American Society for Microbiology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length

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